Marty gets back to his comedy roots

Martin Amis has let himself go at last. His new novel Lionel Asbo: State of England is the broadest comedy he has ever published, a complete farce. There’s no need to take it seriously therefore, despite the grave claim made by the subtitle.

Yet because Amis moved with his family to Brooklyn 18 months ago, this book has been widely anticipated to be a v-sign to England altogether, an impression fostered by Amis’s penchant for disparaging many aspects of Britain when he gives interviews abroad.

Last April, he told Le Nouvel Observateur that the royal family are philistines, that the British press is filthy, that celebrity is the new religion here, and that he would prefer not to be English.

This novel about a violent criminal who wins £150 million on the Lottery while in prison was, he said, a good metaphor to represent the “moral decrepitude” of this country — our belief in getting immense rewards for no effort whatsoever. “You can have no talent and no ambition and you’ll be a winner nonetheless.”

Yet he also maintained in the same interview that he adored the English for their wittiness, tolerance and good humour. And in his latest round of interviews, given to publicise Lionel Asbo, Amis has again rejected the idea that the novel expresses disgust for England. “You can’t write a novel with feelings of disgust. Writing is a much more amorous business than people think, perhaps.”

As soon as you begin this novel, it is clear that Amis does indeed love his monstrous invention, Lionel Asbo. Lionel is a fantastic brute.

Born Lionel Pepperdine, he changed his name by deed poll on his 18th birthday to celebrate having been the youngest ever recipient of an Anti-Social Behaviour Order, at the age of three years and two days.

“A heavily weathered 21” when we meet him, he lives in a flat on the 33rd floor of Avalon Towers in the gruesome London borough of Diston (Dalston? dystopia?), with his pitbulls Joe and Jeff, kept psychopathic on a diet of Special Brew and Tabasco.

In appearance, Lionel is “brutally generic — the slablike body, the full lump of the face, the tight-shaved crown with its tawny stubble … In certain lights and settings he resembled, some said, the England and Manchester United prodigy, striker Wayne Rooney …”

And he is sincerely committed to criminality, being indignant about the very existence of Crimewatch. “They asking members of the public, said Lionel, standing in front of the giant screen with his arms akimbo, to fink on they own neighbours. Crimewatch, it’s a... like a programme for paedophiles, that is.”

Making a marvellous speech at a crim wedding, he proudly recounts the infantile exploits he shared with the groom: “Ringing all the neighbours’ doorbells and giving them the finger. Aged two … And when we was taller, pissing through they letterboxes … Nicking trikes, then bikes, then mopeds, then scooters. This is how you grow. Then proper motors, then vans, then lorries. We had the odd scrap, I don’t mind telling you, about whose turn it was to steer. See, we was only six or seven when we started.”

It is while on remand, for having caused £650,000 of damages to the hotel hosting this wedding, that Lionel wins a fortune, becomes a celebrity, and starts putting it about.

In the funniest scene in the book, he goes to an exclusive fish restaurant near Harrods, downs champagne by the pint and gets upset when he reads in his favourite tabloid that he has lost his record for Asbo precocity to a two-year-old: “This little minx, this little … This little monkey — she was striping all the cars with a doorkey … She was stealing cash and smashing windows … And she got pissed on her mum’s vodka and when the woman from the Social come round she bit her one on the ...”

After losing a fight with the lobster he’s served (“Next time I’ll have the haddock”) , Lionel does grievous bodily harm to two photographers and a policeman and goes back to prison.

When he comes out next time, he takes up with media-savvy glamour-model “Threnody” — desperately jealous of rival reality star “Danube”, rather than of that other great river, Jordan — and she helps him become the nation’s darling, the pair even becoming popularly dubbed “Thrionel” …

This is all knockabout fun, only tangentially connecting with any reality (although it is worth wiki-ing the case of Michael Carroll, the Lotto Lout, or, as he preferred to call himself, “king of the chavs”, who won £9.7 million in 2002).

To be sure, Amis has also inserted a more sentimental and serious subplot about Lionel’s innocent nephew Des, who lives in fear of his uncle ever discovering that at the age of 15 he was knocking off Lionel’s mum, his own grandmother. Des is redeemed by education and by love, first for his wife and then for their baby daughter, Amis evidently being sweet on daughters. He has not been able to leave his horror of ageing aside either.

But never mind. Lionel Asbo is the first Martin Amis novel for a long time to come out of his natural vein for rough farce, the scabrous exposure of human grossness. At last, here is some more fiction by him that doesn’t assert its ultimate seriousness by tackling such themes as the Holocaust, nuclear weapons, Stalinism, or the vastness of interstellar space but instead goes in shamelessly for the low blow, hitting these barn-door-sized targets hard.

I laughed a lot. Amis’s delight in the incorrigible is genuinely Dickensian.

To be sure, some of it still feels helplessly literary (“Threnody” improbably says “glamour and myself are virtually synonymous”, and she is disappointed when her verse fails to win the T S Eliot Prize for Poetry, despite the support of the Evening Standard Diary). There’s a weird absence of reference to any social media too, so that the setting, while allegedly contemporary, seems more never-never. It’s just not very accurate about life in London now.

But it doesn’t need to be. This is a verbally inventive comedy that has about as much connection with real life as P G Wodehouse’s Eggs, Beans and Crumpets in the Drones Club. Or to put it another way, it’s to be enjoyed in the same spirit as Little Britain (Lionel Asbo could be Vicky Pollard’s fearsome older brother). So no v-sign to England, after all. Amis himself, it seems, felt that while writing the book he wasn’t anxious enough about it, compared to his previous novels. But he never should have worried. It’s a hoot.